Mountain Valley Pipeline, LLC's assault on the Virginia Headwaters of the New River

Designed on a desktop in Pittsburgh, PA, without boots on the ground or any sort of analysis of topography and geology, Equitrans took the shortest, least politically powerful route for its Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) to the purported energy need in the Southeast. Paying over $5m in mitigation money up front to Virginia’s political leaders for the environmental damage it knew it could cause, it was free and clear to proceed. Except we fought back. We became Mountain Valley Watch. And for eight years we held MVP to starts and stops because of their failure to adequately limit environmental damage, causing their costs to double and their timetable to languish. And there, but for an act of Congress and votes sold, we would be stalling them still to protect our resources from the environmental damage still to come, and we just might have won. However, the MVP project was authorized to proceed and the environmental damages were allowed to continue. In this presentation we will provide an overview of the Mountain Valley saga and the environmental damages that have continued to occur and be mostly ignored by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.